Google

3 invaluable new Google Analytics tools to help optimise AdWords campaigns

Google have released a number of new tools in Analytics that should be invaluable to help you optimise your AdWords campaigns- these are still in beta so not yet available to everyone, so check under traffic sources in your Analytics account to see if you can access these reports.

Google Think eCommerce conference, 28th April 2010

Yesterday I went to Google’s Think eCommerce event at London’s Royal Opera House. An array of speakers from brands such as Lastminute, Dell and John Lewis as well as Google’s own team of product managers spoke about trends and insights in the field of ecommerce, how best to take advantage of them and what current developments tell us about the future. Here are some of the items that were discussed:

When a High Bounce Rate Isn’t Such A Bad Thing

First, we’ll start with the basics. What is bounce rate? Contrary to what many (myself included) believed, it is not only the amount of time someone spends on a website (e.g. you click on a website and immediately click off after 2 seconds) it is also the number of pages you click after the viewing the landing page (e.g. you click to another page after viewing the landing page).

So the two are quite closely related – for example if you spend 3 minutes reading the landing page you just clicked on, then decide to pick up the phone and ring the company, your visit will count as a bounce. But it is not such a bad bounce because you have unwittingly converted a visitor through a well optimised landing page.

How Important are Meta Information?

Best Practice SEO dictates that you need good meta information as it is essential for SEO. Two tags to focus on are title tags and meta descriptions. Make sure they are descriptive and most importantly, relevant to the content on the website.

If you do have duplicate meta descriptions on your website, you will most likely get a warning in Google Webmaster Tools. Take this as a gentle nudge towards getting into the good habit of having a unique description for each page. After all, this is the summary snippet underneath your link on the search engine results page. The rule of thumb is to keep these under 150 characters in order to have the full sentence visible on the SERP.

Google Stars – Bookmarking made easy

Notice a little star next to your search results this morning? Google announced yesterday that this new bookmarking feature will be available for all globablly signed in users.